


Nevada

by raucousraven



Category: Numb3rs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-11
Updated: 2012-07-11
Packaged: 2017-11-09 14:37:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/456610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raucousraven/pseuds/raucousraven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He comes back tense, alternately too jittery and too still, too sensitized for the loud and pushy heat of Frosh Week at CalSci.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nevada

**Author's Note:**

> This is a companion piece to [Reciprocity.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/451570) Potential triggers for PTSD.

_Charlie refuses to find out how many agents went missing, unaccounted for in the months that follow his unofficial resignation. How many good people vanish, in Kazakhstan and Belgrade and Key West and Rio, because the NSA can’t decode fast enough to warn them. He hates that he knows it was at least two, based on what the codes were when he left them. He hates that he may have trained with both that summer, that he may have waved hello, or been the one to teach them vectorial analysis. He hates that these unnamed lives cost him food and sleep, that he fears his dreams because of them. He knows they have frozen his hands in the middle of more than one upper-class combinatorics seminar, breath choked off, mouth dry. What am I teaching these children to do?_

He comes back tense, alternately too jittery and too still, too sensitized for the loud and pushy heat of Frosh Week at CalSci. Charlie comes back from Nevada apt to duck at the crack of a pop can, to flinch at the floor’s slightest creak, and far too quick to break from an unexpected hand on his arm at the welcome-back party, breathless from not dislocating Kepler’s elbow and shoulder as a matter of course. Charlie exhales, nice and slow, and turns that particular tug-lock-push into a very firm handshake through main force of will. Kepler steps back wincing, makes some comment about chalk and math and deathgrip-inducing theorems; Charlie laughs, but it sounds shrill, so he stops. By then Kepler has moved on, grazing the snack trays and headed for the pod of nervous new hires chatting with Larry at the other end of the table, so no one is around to notice Charlie sink backward into a chair and drop his head to his trembling fingers. Charlie comes back to Pasadena tanned and callused and just a bit too fast, comes back someone who looks at the tower or the fountain or across the Quad, all glowing in sweet honey-light, and thinks _good for sniping, good for bombing, great for shooting – there’s nowhere to hide._ Nevada encircles him like a horizon, rust-red rocks baked in sun, red dust on his lips, ground into his skin; Charlie comes back shattered to pieces, oozing streams of blood and code. Nobody notices. 

Or, at least, Larry doesn’t actively call him on it. Charlie knows what that anxious gaze on his neck and back really means; _mental note: avoid Larry when overstressed. He knows you too well, you’ll blow your cover –_

Strange, that. He’d left his NSA fieldwork behind him, left it pooling in the dust of a red summer afternoon only to find that _return_ meant desperately clinging to ignorance, scrambling after a purity two summers gone, when his hands had been soft and he hadn’t known how to buckle on Kevlar or break a man’s arm or load his pistol in the silent dark, hadn’t known how the desert air smelt of cool iron and sweat and dust when sitting sentry at 5 AM, waiting alone for an attack that might not come.

And it had been a game, in Nevada they’d all been games, but _the man spins with the force of impact, going down in an arc of blood_ , and Charlie’s one measly week into term and he’s nearly blown his cover four times. His cover – last year, even, he’d have called it _his life._

Charlie doesn’t carry anymore. He built the cave in the garage for his gun, burning frantically through those last few days of summer to construct a dual-panelled room with blackboards and textbooks all covered in chalk, and one locker hidden deep in the shadowed back, just to have an excuse to be walking back and forth with large shapeless bags of things that never come back out. His father had grumbled about the amount of dust and energy and noise all this industry threw around, but Charlie worried more about his mother, who spent those days quietly watching her youngest make a fortress out of slate and numbers the way he used to do with pillows when he was small. She had known it meant what it always meant, that he had a secret; Charlie is certain he has hidden nothing from her completely. But she’s slowing down, mellowed out in the past few years; he’d like to think she’s giving herself permission to rest a little more frequently these days.

But there had been nothing restful about her gaze on his exertions. He fears her eyes even more than he fears Larry’s. 

On campus, where haze-eyed geeks roam distractedly in lab packs, most everyone is blind to the newfound tension strung through Charlie’s hunching shoulders. Charlie avoids Larry a little bit more intently the next week, and worries all the blissful abstraction around them will make his body count higher when he finally loses his tenuous grip on his traitorous reflexes and goes rampaging through the Math Library, flinging compasses like knives while screaming about assassins in the daylight because some stream of code finally tipped his sanity right back on its ass. His lab is a nightmare, he’s continually having to not scream or weep or beg; numbers had been pure, his most reliable interface, his loyal allies and dearest friends – now they malinger, accrete into kill-codes, coil into percentages of deceit and assault. He can’t do anything about the muscle cording his forearms, but Charlie comes to class several times that month still bleeding slightly from his hands, where he’s tried unsuccessfully to rip the gun-callus off his palm. 

Miki must be his debt to karma, all 4’9 of her, tiny and round and utterly fearless. She is the lone non-Math major in the midst of his punishing 400-level split graduate seminar, more punishing than usual this year, and so fiercely intelligent she frightens him. The first time she questioned his methodology during class he’d unwittingly flashed back to the expression on Larry’s face the day he’d walked into Dr. Fleindhart’s second astrophysics course, lo, these many years ago. He hadn’t really understood the mixed signals then, confused by the quirked eyebrows, the slight frown and the half-grin. Looking at Miki from inside a free-fall hash of wounded pride and sheer delight, Charlie feels himself cohere momentarily into Professor Charles Eppes. Not _agent._ Not _operative._ For a moment he really has it, _is_ it, and his slight dismay turns into a radiant smile. But then an errant breeze blows hot air through the windows and Charlie’s certainty vanishes into the smell of dust; he answers Miki’s question feeling like an imposter, like a puppet parroting his own words, and doesn’t see her eyes sharpen even further at the way his right hand curls around its bandage in a fist. 

Charlie spends the rest of Fall hiding from everyone around him, ducking out on meetings, avoiding Larry, and loitering in the garage till late at night. He talks class with his mother and sports with his father, and sends frequent emails to keep Larry off the scent, emails on all sorts of things –game theory to elliptical curves to molecular biochemistry and a series of seemingly idle thoughts on causality, disclosure and moral obligation. Larry’s responses range from scattershot to humorous, occasionally veering into the well-crafted philosophical musings that pepper his better papers, as if the importance of integrity is a deep gravity well in his personal field of galaxies. Charlie tries not to notice how Larry isn’t asking any questions in return.

It can’t last. It doesn’t.

Late afternoon is gilding the room with sleepy heat when Miki puts her hand up to ask one last question about the example they’ve been working on all class. She’s followed his progress through the setup and the follow-through, certainly the sharpest eye in the room today, and it’s a gift, to find a student this intense and this brilliant. Charlie’s halfway through his explanation, actually more than a little excited at how the math is flowing through his wrists and fingers, out the chalk onto the board, when he steps back to check his work. And his equanimity’s utterly thrown, just like that, absolute and irrevocable; Miki asks again about the limits placed on _c_ as _n_ approaches zero but Charlie barely hears, can barely breathe, her question echoing around the dreadful blank his terrified mind has suddenly become. He’s staring at the thing he has written on the board, a deceptively simple, very powerful method of bypassing six unwieldy manipulations needed to get to the final answer in the sequence, which is nine, which is the number of people this theorem kills, given the parameters Miki set in her opening statement. He hears the chalk shatter on the floor, a sharp, brittle crack, loud from his frozen hand. Miki’s eyes go from thoughtful to terrified but Charlie doesn’t see; he just barely remembers to dismiss the class before he turns around and stumbles frantically for the door. 

His numbers are pursuing him, off the board and on his neck; they melt reality into slag the shape of blood runnelling over the red-rust ground, hounding him across the dust. Suddenly it’s the games, it’s a hunt, it’s a rout, red rock all around him under the flat heat of a punishing blue sky and a flare of the sun and he’s running flat out, running and running for somewhere to hide, _Oh God, there must be somewhere they can’t find me._ Charlie’s in good shape after Nevada; he runs for a long, long time, jinking desperately through buildings and threading between cars, panic boosting him down the shadows of the long walk, espaliered grey-green olive trees fluttering in the wake of his terrified steps. He fetches up, exhausted, in the shadowed edge of a corner by the pool. Behind him, the library catches the late light, flushed and golden; Charlie stops like snapping chalk, sudden and complete.

The sun is setting across campus, flooding the place with rosy light in the sweet Pacific dusk; beneath the sound and smell of cars there’s a faint, fresh current of salt sea air. But Charlie doesn’t notice, still grappling for control of his breathing and heart rate, numbers spiraling past his knuckles, his legs, streaming out of his helpless hands. He staggers a few feet more, then sags downward, strength draining out like water. Charlie looks down at his trembling right hand, right for pencils and theorems and chalk. Chalk. Chalk dust roughened over gun calluses, settling into those tiny thickened lines and whorls. _Proof._ Charlie shakes his head, looks again: they’re still there. When asked, Larry had said that causality sometimes had little to do with immediate circumstance, that some conclusions were years in the making; Charlie flinches from the look on Miki’s face, interested, alert, and so frighteningly, thoughtfully intent on the beautiful alchemy of math and murder he’d outlined for her on the board. He wonders how many new killers he just birthed, up in that enviably gracious second-story room. His eyes and mouth cramp shut.

Tomorrow he will re-enter that room, reclaim his life; tomorrow he’ll partition his memory like he did his computers, like he did the wall at the back of the garage, gouging a hole to hide a secret too terrible for daylight. He’ll build a black box in his mind, somehow, line it in lead and rivet it shut. He’s a genius. He’ll figure out how. But for now Charlie tips back his head and smells the wind in Nevada, dry, and hot like fury; he can feel the weight of its grit-red iron ore settling heavy on his teeth and lips and tongue. He bites and spits, again and again, his hands, his teeth; keeps his eyes closed and wipes at his face, scrubbing his palms down and down his sides. 

The sun is dropping; he feels its heavy heat pooled along the ridges and lines of his face. He tastes salt, but can’t tell if it’s sweat or blood. Charlie takes a shivering breath, gathers in his strength, and stands. 

He opens his eyes. His breath puffs out in a sob.

Horizon to horizon, all he sees is red dust.


End file.
